Tag Archives: blog

Content Marketing and Proposals are Pretty Much the Same

I’ve taken a very small break from my identity blog post writing business to help a biometric company with a proposal. I am, after all, the biometric proposal writing expert, so I’m at home working on identity proposals. After all, I’ve done it before.

This is NOT a depiction of the bidders’ conference I attended in Connecticut 20 or so years ago. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15798710

Bredemarket’s services are grouped into two distinct and separate functions: content marketing (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and proposals (RFI responses, RFP responses, sole source letters, etc.).

My division of my services makes sense in the real world. After all, in some employment situations, content marketing and proposals employ distinct and separate sets of employees.

The last Association of Proposal Management Professionals Conference I attended, in Chicago in May 2014. From https://www.apmp.org/assets/apmp-annual_report-2014_final.pdf.

But other companies are different. In fact, I’ve seen employment ads seeking marketing/proposals managers. Sounds like a lot of work, unless the company submits few proposals or performs minimal marketing.

And in many companies there are NOT dedicated proposals specialists. Which is why Bredemarket makes its money by helping the salespeople at these firms get the documents out.

Time for the truth

And if we’re truthful with ourselves, content marketing and proposals are pretty much the same thing.

I know this angers some people, who insist that they are content marketing professionals or proposal professionals, with all the proper certifications that a mere mortal could never attain. Or they did attain it, but it lapsed. Or is about to lapse unless I renew it in time.

But hear me out. I’m going to list four aspects of a particular document, and you tell me whether I’m talking about a piece of marketing content, or a proposal.

  1. The document focuses on the customer’s needs.
  2. The document describes benefits the customer will realize.
  3. The document targets one or more sets of people hungry for the solution.
  4. The document shall be in Aptos 12 point, single spaced, with 1 inch margins, and shall not exceed 20 pages.

Guess what? From that description you CAN’T tell if it’s a piece of content or a proposal.

Yes, I know some of you thought item 4 was a dead giveaway because it sounded like an RFP requirement, but maybe some company’s brand guidelines dictate that the firm’s white papers must conform to that format. You never know.

And I know that when you get into the minutiae, there are certain things that proposal writers do that content marketers don’t have to worry about, and vice versa.

But at a high level, the content marketer already knows 90% of the things they need to know to write proposals. And vice versa.

Can we all get along?

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sONfxPCTU0.

Why Your Identity Company Isn’t Saying Anything

Bredemarket spends a lot of its time on competitive analysis, either as part of client projects, or for my own personal edification. For example, right now I’m working on a client project and analyzing 20 of the client’s competitors in over 20 markets serving hundreds of customers.

But when I perform competitive analysis, I use entirely ethical and legal methods to obtain my competitive information. Nothing clandestine that will get me in trouble.

Painting of French spy captured during the Franco-Prussian War. By Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38398454

But sometimes the well of competitive information goes dry. Companies go silent and then come back, with no explanation of why its former communications were…um…incomplete.

    From Jive Records. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1956883

    Of course, I don’t know why a particular company suddenly decides that prospect/customer communication isn’t critically important.

    But this got me thinking. How often DO companies go silent?

    And I had an excellent way to conduct a mini-survey and find out.

    Are the 40+ blogging identity firms still blogging?

    Back in September, I identified over 40 identity firms that were blogging, some more frequently than others. Blogging provides quantifiable benefits, and these companies were obviously taking advantage of those benefits.

    Data source: Daily Infographic, https://www.dailyinfographic.com/state-of-blogging-industry

    But that was back in September. How many of those companies were still actively blogging in mid-December? I wanted to find out, so I conducted a mini-survey of those identity blogs. Of the 40+ companies whose blogs and articles had identifiable posting dates:

    • 21 had blogged at least once this month (December).
    • 11 had last blogged in November.
    • 3 had last blogged in October.
    • 7 hadn’t blogged since the 3rd calendar quarter of 2023 (July – September).
    • 4 hadn’t blogged since the 2nd calendar quarter (April – June).
    • 1 hadn’t blogged since the 1st calendar quarter (January – March).
    • 1 hadn’t blogged at all in 2023. Perhaps it forgot it had a blog, or a former employee never surrendered the password.
    A little quiet, aren’t you? By Lorelei7, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3164780

    My mini-survey shows that of the 40+ identity firms with blogs, about one-third of them HAVEN’T SAID A SINGLE THING to their prospects and customers in the last two months.

    Is your firm failing to engage in identity blog post writing, even though you have a blog?

    But what about other communications?

    To be fair, this is not a complete measure of corporate content marketing. While some of these companies hadn’t blogged on their own websites, they HAD communicated on Instagram (Mark Zuckerberg’s website), LinkedIn (Satya Nadella’s website), X (Elon Musk’s website), YouTube (Sundar Pichai’s website), and other websites controlled by other people. Great traffic for Zuck et al…not so great traffic for the companies.

    More importantly, some of these companies communicate via email, which is a great way to find out what the company is doing…if the company has your email address.

    If the company doesn’t have your email address, and if it isn’t blogging, then it’s going to be hard for prospects to find company information.

    So why is your identity firm ignoring your customers?

    Some identity companies with blogs and similar mechanisms are consciously making the choice to NOT communicate with their prospects and customers.

    Why not?

    There are many reasons. Here are five reasons that Full Funnel identified.

    • A couple of them have already been addressed by Bredemarket, such as “we don’t have the time.” (Bredemarket has the time.)
    • But I would like to dive into Full Funnel’s fourth reason: “we don’t have anything to say.” I encourage you to read Full Funnel’s response to that objection, because I agree with it. Your firm MUST have something to say if it wants to differentiate itself and remain viable. If you don’t have anything to say, prospects will go to your more talkative competitors.

    When is your identity company going to start communicating with your prospects and customers?

    If your identity company has fallen down on the blogging front, it’s best to restart the process as soon as possible. As I’ve said before, content marketing doesn’t yield immediate results. A particular piece of content may not result in a sale until six or twelve months later, or longer. Delaying the implementation simply delays the benefits I mentioned above.

    So if your identity company is failing to reach your prospects and customers with content, why don’t you talk with Bredemarket now and develop a plan to reach them?

    Yes, I know we’re right in the middle of the holidays, and some of you will put this off until next week, or probably the week after next.

    For me, that’s just as well. That gives me more time to talk to your competitors and get their content process moving.

    If you DON’T want your competitors to get in line ahead of you, click the image below and schedule a meeting. I’m available this week and most of next week.

    Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

    When I Had To Describe This Technology, Words Failed Me

    (TL;DR people can click here.)

    What is this technology?

    Last Saturday I hoped to gain inspiration so that I could shoot a video or capture an image to promote Bredemarket’s technology writing services—namely, writing blog posts, case studies, white papers, or other content to empower technology firms.

    By mid-morning, with no inspiration, I captured a technology image of…something.

    Chaffey High School, Ontario, California, November 11, 2023.

    As I confessed in my “behind the scenes” video that day, I have no idea what this thing is, or whether this is used for water, gas, or something else entirely.

    Chaffey High School, Ontario, California, November 11, 2023.

    Why I did not know

    And do you want to know WHY I couldn’t describe what I saw?

    Because I failed to get a collaborator to work with me.

    If an appropriate person from Chaffey High School presented themselves to me, they could have described:

    • Why this technology was necessary.
    • How the technology worked.
    • What the technology was.

    You’ll notice that I asked the “why” question BEFORE I asked the “how” and “what” questions. Because “why” is most important. If a student or staff member sees this thing on the Chaffey campus, they naturally want to know why it’s there. They don’t really care if it pumps 100 liters of whatever per second.

    How I can produce the right words for your technology firm

    And that’s how I will work with YOUR technology firm when Bredemarket creates content. We work TOGETHER to create the content you need.

    Do you need to create content that converts prospects for your technology product/service and drives content results?

    Learn more by clicking on the image.

    Drive content results with Bredemarket Technology Firm Services.

    P.S. Don’t wait. There’s a cost to waiting.

    Need Blog Help?

    Need blog help?

    Why should you work with Bredemarket to craft your customer-focused blog post about your product or service?

    • Bredemarket asks the right questions so your content doesn’t miss your goals.
    • Bredemarket collaborates with you so your blog post doesn’t include the wrong message.
    • Bredemarket fills your content marketing gap so your prospects don’t go elsewhere.

    Get started today at https://bredemarket.com/contact/.

    Converting Prospects For Your Firm’s “Something You Are” Solution

    As identity/biometric professionals well know, there are five authentication factors that you can use to gain access to a person’s account. (You can also use these factors for identity verification to establish the person’s account in the first place.)

    I described one of these factors, “something you are,” in a 2021 post on the five authentication factors.

    Something You Are. I’ve spent…a long time with this factor, since this is the factor that includes biometrics modalities (finger, face, iris, DNA, voice, vein, etc.). It also includes behavioral biometrics, provided that they are truly behavioral and relatively static.

    From https://bredemarket.com/2021/03/02/the-five-authentication-factors/

    As I mentioned in August, there are a number of biometric modalities, including face, fingerprint, iris, hand geometry, palm print, signature, voice, gait, and many more.

    From Sandeep Kumar, A. Sony, Rahul Hooda, Yashpal Singh, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research, “Multimodal Biometric Authentication System for Automatic Certificate Generation.”

    If your firm offers an identity solution that partially depends upon “something you are,” then you need to create content (blog, case study, social media, white paper, etc.) that converts prospects for your identity/biometric product/service and drives content results.

    Bredemarket can help.

    Click below for details.

    Drive Content Results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

    Measuring Goals: What Cathy Camera Says

    I am repurposing my recent e-book “Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You” as a post series on the Bredemarket Instagram account. I am doing this because series are cool and stuff. Whether or not my readers are anticipating each new post in the series is up for debate. Maybe all of them have read the e-book already. (Or maybe not.)

    Monday’s Instagram post on the goal of your content

    Anyway, on Monday I got to the fifth post in the Instagram series. Here’s what the post image looks like. (The Yogi Berra-themed image is timely with baseball’s World Series going on right now, even though the Yankees are nowhere near it.)

    From https://www.instagram.com/p/CzB2biBr27o/

    And here’s the text that accompanied the Instagram post:

    The fourth of the seven questions your content creator should ask you is Goal?
    It’s important that you set a goal.
    Maybe awareness. Maybe consideration. Maybe conversion. Maybe something else.
    As Yogi Berra reportedly said, “if you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.” And that “someplace else” might not be where you want to be.
    #bredemarket7questions #contentmarketing #contentmarketingexpert #goal #goals

    From https://www.instagram.com/p/CzB2biBr27o/

    Cathy Camera’s LinkedIn comment

    Well, as long as I had created the post series for Instagram, I figured I’d share the same series on two other Bredemarket social channels, one of which was the Bredemarket LinkedIn page.

    When I posted the image and accompanying text there, Cathy Camera commented.

    Who is Cathy Camera, you may ask? Well, Camera is “The Construction Copywriter.”

    You need to get ahead of your competitors. So you need your clients to understand you’re delivering reliable, high-quality services.

    Having someone like me, with knowledge of and experience working with your industry, will help you achieve your goals more quickly without stress.

    From https://cathycamera.com.au/

    If you guessed that Camera has thoughts about goals, you’re right. Here’s the comment she added to my LinkedIn post:

    Yes, there should always be a goal and if people can be more specific about objectives, they’ll at least be able to measure their results.

    From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bredemarket_bredemarket7questions-contentmarketing-contentmarketingexpert-activity-7124787047231283200-G5Xn/

    Cathy Camera highlighted something that I didn’t.

    • The goal you set isn’t only important when you have to create the content.
    • The goal you set is also important after you publish the content and you need to determine if the content did its job.

    Being SMART in your goals

    Note Camera’s comment about being “more specific about objectives.”

    Ideally your goal for your content (or for anything) should be a SMART goal, where SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

    • For example, a goal to enable Bredemarket to make US$10,000,000 (or A$10,000,000) from a single blog post is not an attainable goal.
    • But a goal to have blog post readers engage a certain number of times is certainly a relevant goal.

    So it looks like my “set a goal” advice for your content could be a lot more…um…specific.

    I’m not going to revise the e-book (again), but I did revise my form.

    You’re Doing It Wrong™: One Piece of Collateral Isn’t Enough

    If you create a single piece of collateral for your product or service and say that you’ve completed your job, “you’re doing it wrong™.”

    Product marketers and content marketers know that you’re just starting.

    John Bonini on content vs. channel

    John Bonini advises that you separate the content from the channel.

    What most companies practice is not actually content marketing. It’s channel marketing.

    They’re not marketing the content. They’re marketing the channel.

    From LinkedIn.

    You can express a single thought on multiple channels. And as far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.

    Me on “expert” advice on social media channel adoption

    Incidentally, that’s why I object to the “expert” advice that I master one social media channel first before branching out into others.

    If I adopt that strategy and ONLY market on LinkedIn and ignore Instagram and TikTok, I am automatically GUARANTEEING that the potential Instagram and TikTok audiences will never hear about my offer.

    “How I Expanded 1 Idea into 31 Pieces of Content”

    I’ve expressed my thoughts on this social media “expert” advice before:

    The latter post, entitled “How I Expanded 1 Idea into 31 Pieces of Content,” described how…well, the title is pretty self-explanatory. I created 31 pieces of content based on a single idea.

    Create Technology Content That Converts

    The 31 pieces of content, published both through the Bredemarket channels (see above) and via my personal channels (including my jebredcal blog and my LinkedIn page), all increased the chance that SOMEONE would see the underlying message: “Your prospects don’t care about your technology.” Each piece of content was tuned for the particular channel and its target audience, ensuring that the message would resonate.

    By Christian Gidlöf – Photo taken by Christian Gidlöf, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065930

    As I often say, repurposing is good.

    Speaking of repurposing, I’ve already adapted the words above and published them in four different ways (this is the fourth)…and counting. No TikTok video yet though.

    Can Bredemarket help you repurpose or create content?

    And if I can do this for me, I can do this for you.

    Bredemarket can help you create content that converts prospects and drives content results. Why?

    If you’re sold on using Bredemarket to create customer-focused messaging (remember: your prospects don’t care about your technology), or even if you’re not and just want to talk about your needs, there are three ways to move forward with your content project. Or you can just join the Bredemarket mailing list to stay informed.

    • Book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket. Be sure to fill out the information form so I can best help you.
    From calendly.com/bredemarket. 
    Bredemarket logo

    Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You: the e-book version

    No, this is not déjà vu all over again.

    If you’re familiar with Bredemarket’s “six questions your content creator should ask you”…I came up with a seventh question because I feared the six questions were not enough, and I wanted to provide you with better confidence that Bredemarket-authored content will achieve your goals.

    To no one’s surprise, I’ll tell you WHY and HOW I added a seventh question.

    If you want to skip to the meat, go to the WHAT section where you can download the new e-book.

    Why?

    Early Sunday morning I wrote something on LinkedIn and Facebook that dealt with three “e” words: entertainment, emotion, and engagement, and how the first and second words affect the third. The content was very long, and I don’t know if the content itself was engaging. But I figured that this wasn’t the end of the story:

    I know THIS content won’t receive 250 engagements, and certainly won’t receive 25,000 impressions, but maybe I can repurpose the thoughts in some future content. (#Repurposing is good.)

    From LinkedIn.

    But what to repurpose?

    Rather than delving into my content with over 25,000 impressions but less than 250 engagements, and rather than delving into the social media group I discussed, and rather than delving into the Four Tops and the Sons of the Pioneers (not as a single supergroup), I decided that I needed to delve into a single word: indifference, and how to prevent content indifference.

    Because if your prospects are indifferent to your content, nothing else matters. And indifference saddens me.

    By Mark Marathon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72257785

    How?

    Eventually I decided that I needed to revise an old piece of content from 2022.

    The first questions in the Bredemarket Kickoff Guide, BmtKickoffGuide-20231022a. No, you can’t have the guide; it’s proprietary.

    I decided that I needed to update my process, as well as that e-book, and add a seventh question, “Emotions?”

    What?

    For those who have raced ahead to this section, Bredemarket has a new downloadable e-book (revised from an earlier version) entitled “Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.” It includes a new page, “Emotions,” as well as minor revisions to the other pages. You can download it below.

    Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You (October 22, 2023)Download

    Goal, Benefits, Target Audience, and Emotions

    You’ll have to download the e-book to find the answers to the remaining four questions.

    Technology Firms: Drive Content Results

    Does your technology firm need written content—blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers?

    Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?

    How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?

    Learn how Bredemarket can create content that drives results for your technology firm.

    Click the image below.

    Drive content results with Bredemarket Technology Firm Services.

    #contentmarketing #technology

    Inland Empire Firms: Drive Content Results

    Does your Inland Empire firm need written content—blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers?

    Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?

    How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?

    Learn how Bredemarket can create content that drives results for your Inland Empire firm.

    Click the image below.

    Drive content results with Bredemarket Inland Empire Services.

    #contentmarketing #inlandempire